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With the news of Ryan Davis leaving Gamespot now becoming official, this becomes the second editor to quit in the last 30 days and there is a lingering feeling that this is only the beginning of the problem for Gamespot in regards to writer and editor retention.

Two months ago, a bombshell was dropped over at Gamespot, with the termination of employment for one Jeff Gerstmann. Jeff was a staple employee for the site, going back ten years and it was a shock, not only to fans of the site, but even to employees of the site that had no advance notice of what was about to happen. Added into this was the rumor of the termination being linked to a poor review for a game due to pressure from an advertiser. Slow response from parent company CNet just made the problem worse.

Gamespot tried to smooth things over with its readers, but some damage had already been done and they lost a chunk of regular readers and paid subscribers. We had the On the Spot show that began with a rather somber address over the whole incident where you could feel the pain and anger that the team was feeling over being left out of the loop. The same is to be said on the Hotspot podcast, where more was said about how the crew were shocked and a bit unhappy about how the whole event went down. After a few weeks, the tide subsided, but some wondered where the writers and editors would be at after all of this went down.

More info was shed on this when Frank Provo, a longtime freelancer for Gamespot decided he wanted nothing more to do with Gamespot. He decided that he did not like the way the Gerstmann situation was handled. Not too long after that, another mainstay at Gamespot, Alex Navarro, decided to put in his notice and finished his last day on Jan 24th. Now, with Ryan Davis leaving, and from reading his last blog entry, you can see the pain that he went through with the termination of Jeff Gerstmann, you have to wonder what this does to Gamespot and how do they handle this exodus. And it is an exodus, because there are rumors that there are more that will be leaving at some point.

Gamespot has lost a chunk of its longtime talent. The three of these writers together have been with the company for at least 6-8 years. All were well liked and received by the community of Gamespot and it just seems like a huge blow to the site. Ricardo Torres was recently made the Editor In Chief at Gamespot, and has the difficult task of finding ways to bring back a sense of value to the site. It will be a long road for the site to reclaim its spot as the place to go for reading reviews and news. It will be interesting to see if Gamespot can do it, but no one can be envious of the road that they have to travel to get back on top.